In Which We Discuss My Unread Pile (Again) (Again)

My unread pile now has 179 books in it, down from 194 on the 5th and 2014 on the 1st. Go me!  I read eight;

...and donated a few more.  Including India Knight's Comfort and Joy.

I used to love India Knight's books.  I liked My Life on a Plate, and adored Don't You Want Me.  Then I read her comments on Shannon Matthews, and couldn't pick up any of her books without remembering them.

From Owen Jones' Chavs;

...as India Knight put it about Maddie, she had vanished from a holiday resort “which specialises in providing family-friendly holidays to the middle classes.” The joy of these resorts were that they “were populated by recognisable types” where you could sigh in relief and think, “Everyone is like us”. They were not places you would expect to meet “the kind of people who wallop their weeping kids in Sainsbury’s.”

Journalists were often honest about why there was less interest in Shannon’s disappearance. “It is ‘up North’, it is a bleak mix of pebbledash council blocks and neglected wasteland, and it is populated by some people capable of confirming the worst stereotype and prejudice of the white underclass,” wrote one Times journalist. Melanie Reid argued “we are as removed from that kind of poverty as we are from events in Afghanistan. For life among the white working class of Dewsbury looks like a foreign country.”

I'm the mixed race result of a teenage pregnancy, raised by a single mother on a council estate.  India Knight's comments reveal her thoughts; that people whose families looked like mine, whose homes looked like mine were not "people like us".  Instead, we are "the kind of people who wallop [their] weeping kids in Sainsbury's".  Because, as everyone knows, it is impossible to be whatever makes up 'people like us' when you grow up on a council estate.  It is impossible not to be the sort of person who 'wallops' weeping kids in Sainsbury's when you're poor.

I cannot read India Knight's books without being reminded of those comments and that mindset.  So, no, Ms Knight.  Just no.  Fuck you.